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    Microsoft Software Development Engineer Interview Questions

    Interviews at Microsoft

    1,083 Interview Reviews

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    Helpful (30)  

    Software Development Engineering Interview

    Anonymous Interview Candidate in Seattle, WA (US)
    No Offer
    Positive Experience
    Average Interview

    Application

    I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA (US)) in October 2016.

    Interview

    I was referred by a friend that had interned the previous summer. I was first sent an email to send in my resume and complete a short form. Later on, I got invited to have a phone interview. The phone screen was mostly behavioral with one logic question and one question about recursion. After the phone screen, I was invited to fly out to Seattle for an on site interview. The on-site interview was a series of 4 back to back technical interviews. I was asked to explain things on my resume and also one technical question for each interview.

    Interview Questions

    • Suppose you have 11 marbles and a two-pan balance used to compare the weight of 2 things. All of the marbles weigh the same except for one, which is heavier than all of the others. How would you find the heaviest marble if you are only allowed to weigh the marbles 3 times?   10 Answers

    Other Interview Reviews for Microsoft

    1. Helpful (16)  

      Software Development Engineering Interview

      Anonymous Employee
      Accepted Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Interview

      I visited their booth at my University's career fair and then got an on-campus interview about 1 and a half months later. The on-campus interview was a short 30 minute interview where I got asked questions about linked lists: How would you determine if there is a cycle in a linked list? How would you find the head of the cycle i.e. where the cycle starts? How would you find the kth element from the end of a linked list? Then about 2 weeks later I got an invitation for interviews on-site and about 3 weeks after that I flew out to Redmond. I had 4 interviews on-site which had behavioral questions and also coding questions like: How would you test a phone (your simple 20 year old phone)? Give test cases for some functions whose implementation is not know i.e. blackbox testing. The people there were great and I really liked their campus.

      Interview Questions

      • Given a linked list with three fields: a data field, a next field and a random pointer field (which is a field that points to null or to an element in the linked list) write a function to return a copy of the linked list without destructively modifying the original linked list   5 Answers

      Negotiation

      I didn't negotiate because they were offering me a lot already.

    2. Helpful (6)  

      Software Development Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Employee in Redmond, WA (US)
      Accepted Offer
      Positive Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA (US)) in February 2017.

      Interview

      I was messaged by Microsoft recruiters from Linkedin. They sent me an online assesment which you have to complete in 60 minutes. If you pass that you will be able to go on-site. I interviewed at Microsoft on campus in Redmond for a full day loop of 6 people. Everyone was super friendly and super excited about future of Microsoft under new CEO leadership.

      Interview Questions

      • Signed NDA Contract. Algorithmic and Design Architecture Problems. They drill you deep on multi threading and distributed systems.   3 Answers
      3. Join the Microsoft team
      See Our Latest Jobs

    3. Helpful (12)  

      Software Development Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Employee in Redmond, WA (US)
      Accepted Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA (US)) in April 2017.

      Interview

      I got referred to a specific team at Microsoft as New Grad hiring was halted for 2016. Talked to a manager on the phone for an hour, and was asked about my resume and did a interview question. Was flown to Seattle 2 weeks later and had an onsite interview with the team at Redmond. It consisted of 5 interviews with coding and culture-fit questions. I was at the Microsoft Campus from 9AM to 4:30PM. The process was nice, and the interviews were more conversational than say Google onsite interviews. I got a call 2 days later with an offer to join the team.

      Microsoft enjoyed asking data structure questions with arrays, linked lists, strings, etc. Questions on graphs are said to be rare. Be prepared to answer any design questions, which may be follow up questions to coding questions.

      Interview Questions

      • Questions on string traversal, arrays + math were common in my interview.   4 Answers

    4. Helpful (7)  

      Software Development Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Negative Experience

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Microsoft.

      Interview

      I was contacted by the recruiter for the SDE position for their hiring event. I was asked to register and will get the Online test in a week. It's been more than a month since than. I tried to reach the recruiter many times but won't respond back. Any other recruiters won't accept my application since I was contacted previously by other recruiter. I don't understand whether they really are looking for engineers or an applicant just suffers because of all this inside conflicts. It's not believable from such a good company.

      Interview Questions

    5. Helpful (3)  

      Software Development Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in Los Angeles, CA (US)
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied through college or university. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Los Angeles, CA (US)) in December 2016.

      Interview

      I applied and got an on-campus interview because of a connection with Campus Recruitment.

      The interview was quick, with a coding question, some resume review, and a question about explaining and making a simple diagram of a previous project. Not a very personal experience, and I likely did not stand out enough as a confident candidate.

      Interview Questions

      • Given the head of a linked list, write a program in your language of choice to return the middle node of the list.   7 Answers

    6. Helpful (17)  

      Software Development Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Employee in Bellevue, WA (US)
      Accepted Offer
      Neutral Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bellevue, WA (US)) in January 2017.

      Interview

      Had a referral sent in by a friend and had a phone screen with the manager (mostly questions about the team and my past experience, followed by a quick coding question). Followed by about a month of inactivity and then was brought in to an onsite with 4 people (3 engineers, 1 manager) and a lunch at the cafeteria. Each round involved talking about personal projects and experience, followed by a technical question and a demo of the team's product in several cases. Surprised by a 5th interviewer pop up at the end who seemed unaware of me and was on his phone and walked off in the middle to get tea. Maybe this was a test to see how I would respond? Was called a couple days later with a negotiable offer, only minor problems with difficulty getting hold of the recruiter.

      Interview Questions

      • Given 4 coins of values 1, 5, 10, and 20, find all the combinations of coins that can add up to K.   4 Answers
      • Create a button menu using Javascript.   3 Answers
      • Find ways to insert data collection in Javascript events.   3 Answers
      • Given a linked list, put all the odd elements in lexicographical order list in front of the even elements in lexicographical order in place.   4 Answers
      • Design chess using OOP.   2 Answers

    7. Helpful (1)  

      Software Development Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Employee in Redmond, WA (US)
      Accepted Offer
      Negative Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 7+ weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA (US)) in February 2013.

      Interview

      5 algorithmic questions got asked over and over different data structures and algorithm questions. It was difficult compared to modern hiring practices. Totally different once I joined the team. Worse thing is that the lunch interview is still an interview so watch out.

      Interview Questions

    8. Helpful (3)  

      Software Development Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Employee in Seattle, WA (US)
      Accepted Offer
      Positive Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied through college or university. The process took 3+ months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA (US)) in October 2016.

      Interview

      First round - on campus 45 minutes coding round. Flew to Seattle. Total 4 rounds in person. Three coding rounds and one behavioral + previous work experience + projects + background. All coding rounds are whiteboard coding.

      Interview Questions

      • Questions on Tree and Array. A recursive and non-recursive solution for each.   2 Answers

    9. Helpful (49)  

      Software Development Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Employee in Redmond, WA (US)
      Accepted Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA (US)) in January 2017.

      Interview

      I was referred by a friend of mine currently working at Microsoft. I first did a 45 minute on-campus interview which consisted of one easy question plus some behaviorals. Unfortunately, Microsoft had fulfilled their hiring quota for the year, but a spot opened up in mid-December and I scheduled my on-site to be in January.

      The on-site consisted of five interviews about an hour long each, with some standard data structures/algorithm questions plus one system design question. The fifth interviewer also asked some behaviorals. The algorithm questions were probably around LeetCode Medium level.

      Interview Questions

      • Given a list of n unsorted key-value tuples which are too large to fit in memory, return the k tuples with the greatest value where n is several orders of magnitude greater than k. This list may be dispersed across multiple machines.   3 Answers
      • Given a tree of order n which is neither complete or a search tree, write a function to construct a new tree of order m in-place. Memory usage is bound to 2 times the size of the tree. The new tree must be complete, and a node A cannot be a child of another node B in the new tree if A was an ancestor of B in the old tree.   4 Answers
      • Given a list of movement commands (up, down, left, right, undo previous action), write a function that returns the final (x,y) coordinate. Followup: how would you handle other kinds of commands and undoing them? What kind of design pattern is this?   2 Answers
      • Given two very large timestamped sorted log files that do not fit in memory (possibly on different machines), merge them in timestamp order. Provide some test cases.   2 Answers
      • Describe how you would design a data experimentation platform.   1 Answer
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